Option C: Recall, with Ben Gitenstein

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[00:00:00] Christie Robertson: Hello and welcome to Seattle Hall Pass, a podcast with news and conversation about Seattle Public Schools. I'm Christie Robertson.

[00:00:14] Jane Tunks Demel: I'm Jane Tunks Demel. 

[00:00:16] Jasmine Pulido: And I'm Jasmine Pulido. 

[00:00:17] Christie Robertson: On September 11th, Superintendent Jones announced the unveiling of a website describing two school closure options that were purported to transform the school district into a series of fewer, larger, “well-resourced" schools. Option A would have closed all option schools and many neighborhood schools, 21 schools in all. Option B would have closed 17 schools in all, leaving one option school per region of the city.

[00:00:48] Jane Tunks Demel: After huge public outcry, Superintendent Jones ditched those plans. On October 1st, he stated his intention to pursue the closure of only five schools in the next year. 

[00:01:00] Christie Robertson: And just at Wednesday’s school board meeting [October 9], the board passed a resolution asking the superintendent for a plan to close up to five schools in the 2025-26 school year. The vote was six to one with Sarah Clark voting no.

[00:01:14] Jane Tunks Demel: So I guess that's the district's option C for now.

[00:01:17] Jasmine Pulido: Meanwhile, the team here at Seattle Hall Pass has been talking with our community about what their option Cs would be. And we've had some really fascinating conversations with some smart and interesting folks.

[00:01:31] Christie Robertson: We are going to start with probably the most radical, attention-grabbing idea, that of school board recall. This comes to us from Ben Gitenstein.

[00:01:41] Jane Tunks Demel: A friendly reminder that all opinions expressed by our guests are their own. 

We want to welcome Ben Gitenstein, who is an SPS parent and former school board candidate. And wait a minute, didn't you two run against each other?

[00:01:55] Christie Robertson: That's right. Yes, we did, in District 3.

[00:01:59] Jane Tunks Demel: And which one of you won? 

[00:02:02] Christie Robertson: That would be Evan Briggs.

[00:02:04] Ben Gitenstein: I was going to say neither.

[00:02:06] Jane Tunks Demel: Ha! But I love how you're both still so involved in Seattle Public Schools and that you still want to make it better.

[00:02:14] Ben Gitenstein: Absolutely. Absolutely.

[00:02:16] Christie Robertson: And so Ben, as you know, this series of episodes is called Option C. We're talking about the options A and B that have been presented to the school board and what other possibilities are there out there in the world. And we know that you're interested in the idea of school board recall. So tell us about what that means and what you think it would do for us.

[00:02:42] Ben Gitenstein: Sure, let's organize this into four questions.  we're on the eve of the High Holy Days. Let's organize this into four questions. So, of course, I start thinking about the Four Questions. 

Why should we do it? Why should we do it now? Why would we do this? And how do you do it? So let's talk about a recall in sort of those four lenses.

 Question 1: Why consider recall?

[00:03:08] Ben Gitenstein: So why should we, why would we consider, as a community, recalling the school board? For me, it's very simple. The leadership team at Seattle Public Schools, in general, the school board and the senior leadership at Seattle Public Schools, is behaving ideologically, not logically. They are being ideological, not logical. 

Any manager of an organization who came in to an organization and found that expenses were significantly outrunning revenue, that you were spending more than you were bringing in, and therefore you have a budget crisis, would look at that situation and say, “How do I raise my revenues so that I am in balance and thriving, and simultaneously cut my expenses, while doing the least possible damage to the thing that makes my organization great to the intrinsic value of the service I provide.”

Our leadership team at Seattle Public Schools is literally doing the exact opposite of that. They are doing the mirror image of that. They are doing everything they can to lower revenues, and in fact have gone out and said they do not see raising the number of enrolled kids in our district as a route to closing our gap. They've expressed essentially zero interest. So they're not interested in raising revenues.

And at the same time, they are cutting the things that have the most enduring value. In our city, small schools that knit neighborhoods together, option schools that give kids who need something different a place to go. They're doing the exact opposite of what a logical management team would do.

So that's why we should be considering this. Because the management team, for which I include the board, is behaving ideologically, not logically. 

Question 2: Why now?

[00:05:22] Ben Gitenstein: So let's talk about why now. Because this is an extraordinarily consequential moment in the life of Seattle Public Schools. Every budget deficit is hard. Every year is important. But this is an extraordinarily consequential moment. You close 20 schools, you're not gonna just flip a switch and right that wrong later. If you continue the enrollment decline and send a message to parents that they're not welcome in Seattle Public Schools, they're not coming back. This is an extraordinarily important moment in the life of Seattle Public Schools. And we have to act. 

And the reality is we do not have another election until November 2025. So you have a full year until we can even get a new board in place to do something about it. So the decisions they're making now and the behavior they're exhibiting is extraordinarily important and consequential, and we don't have anything we can do about it as citizens until end of next year, which is after a lot of horses will be out of a lot of barns. That's going to be rough. 

Okay last two questions then are why this? Why would we do a recall? Why is a recall important?

Question 3: Why recall specifically?

[00:06:39] Ben Gitenstein: A recall is an option of last resort. It's the last thing that you should approach. You should not recall elected officials because you don't like the policies that they're enacting. In fact, we can get into this in the how, but the standard for a recall in Washington State and King County is very high. The law makes it pretty hard. 

But you would expect if you were trying to influence and move elected officials that the first thing a group of citizens would do is go meet with them and express their displeasure with the decisions being made by the elected official. And if not that, then they would go to the forums which the legislative elected officials hold for citizens to tell them, "Hey, we don't like what you're doing." 

But this board is fundamentally undemocratic. They are fundamentally undemocratic. With the exception of one school board member, they don't hold community meetings. They cut the number of board meetings that they hold in public in half. And at the beginning of every board meeting, when the public can actually go talk to their board members and express their displeasure, the president of our board says almost every time, she says, this stuff you guys do where you come and talk to us at these board meetings is all performative. She is openly dismissive of citizens of Seattle coming and telling the school board, "We don't like what you're doing."

Lastly, and if you've spent any time talking to PTAs like I have, I think you'll hear this. The PTAs and families in the district have reached out to their board members and asked, "Hey, I would like to meet with you and tell you about the impact of your decision on me and my family or me and my community." And they don't get emails back. They just don't respond. 

This board is not behaving like a normal legislative body, or like a democratic institution. They're subverting that. Which leaves us, as citizens... let's all boil it down. 

We don't get to elect the superintendent. The superintendent is hired and fired by the board. In fact, that is pretty much their number one responsibility. And the superintendent hires his management team and the superintendent and that management team goes and executes policy. So the only way we as voters who pay for the school district with our taxes, the only way we as voters get to influence what's really happening at our school district is through the school board. And the school board is acting fundamentally undemocratically.

That leaves you with, like, so what else are you supposed to do? If you told me that they would meet with us, then I would say you don't need to recall them. If you told me that they were listening to constituents and that they were open to feedback, then I would say, okay, well then you don't have a cause for recall. But they do not do that and they've showed no interest in it.

So that's why that's why I think, as a community, we have no choice but to explore this option. And it's an option I don't take lightly. It's an option that has to be the last resort, but explain to me what else we're supposed to do. 

At the board meeting [on September 18], the one that really went off the rails where they reviewed the two plans, the one with the with that amazing outpouring of parents coming and driving all the way down to the John Stanford Center in the middle of the week through traffic. (By the way, there was a Mariners game that night, so it was like really inconvenient to get there.)

At that meeting, I saw more actual engagement from the board with constituents than most of them have done in since they were elected. Because the constituents were there, and during the break between moments of their session, they couldn't escape them. Because the constituents got up out of their seats and said, "No, I'm going to talk to you." That is just fundamentally undemocratic, that behavior. 

Question 4: How does recall work?

[00:11:06] Ben Gitenstein: Okay, so that's that's the why now, why this. So how does it work? 

So, as someone who has, for whatever reason, decided to spend a lot of time learning about how recalls work, basically, a recall goes like this. I think it's a state statute. The way a recall is defined is, first, you have to show that an elected official violated their oath of office or acted in demonstrated misfeasance or malfeasance. And those words are... there's not a ton of law around this that defines those words very clearly.

So, it's a little bit, hmm, squishy, let’s call it, about what counts as those things. 

[00:11:53] Christie Robertson: But I did put the Washington RCW definitions of these terms into our show notes.

[00:11:58] Ben Gitenstein: But the most obvious way to look at it is, you have to show that it's the way they acted as an elected official and the way they approached being an elected official that was in violation of some law or policy. And it's important to distinguish between that and the policy they've enacted.

So, for example, it's pretty hard to make a case that you should recall the school board because they closed schools. As in that you disagree with that policy like that in and of itself isn't really recallable because you can't recall an elected official for enacting a policy you don't like. Because that's that is in and of itself undemocratic elections have consequences. They were voted in. They have the right to execute their policy agenda and we as voters we don't like it should vote them out in the next election. So really it has to be about how they are behaving as elected officials. 

And just as a process, what you do is you come up with a petition that says here is our list of charges, ways they've behaved that demonstrate misfeasance, malfeasance, or violation of their oath of office. And then you take that to King County Elections, which then takes it to the prosecutor's office. The prosecutor's office takes it to a judge. 

You have a hearing, where the judge basically says, "Are you making this up?" Like, "does this rise to the level if it were true?" And "do you have enough evidence to say this could be true?" The judge doesn't actually find for fact because it's not a trial. The judge is basically just saying, "Is this reasonably possible that it would be true? And if it were true, does it meet the standard?" 

If yes, if you get through that hearing, then you go collect a whole bunch of signatures, and then you get on a ballot.

So that's the high level of the process. The way the election works is they basically declare an election for that issue. So let's say that there was a citizen's petition to recall Liza Rankin, you would go through that entire process. And at the end of that process, basically, King County Elections would schedule an election on that issue. They might attach it to a nearby election, so if there was a levy or a bond issue or even a general election or primary, they might attach it to that, or they might just issue it on its own. 

There's some blackout periods. You can't do it within six months of when that elected official would be up for election. So none of the people who are up, you couldn't recall them within six months of their next election. But other than that, whenever you want to do it is fine.

[00:14:31] Ben Gitenstein: And this is important. The last thing is the only standard here is that you have to be a registered voter. And I think that's important because one of the biggest problems that we have in Seattle Public Schools is that the only people right now, or at least for the last too many years, who have been paying attention, are a small subset of very engaged parents. And that has allowed insanity to fester inside the leadership team of Seattle Public Schools. 

Because the rest of the voting population, they care about this as much as they sort of care about the ports. And it's like, I haven't spent much time thinking about the ports, I'm sure there's probably craziness going on at the ports, too, but people just don't pay attention. And because they're not paying attention, like, bad things happen in the shadows, right? 

And people have not been paying attention and bad stuff has been happening and we have not been paying attention, and as a result, we get all these negative outcomes. We need to get the voters of Seattle to pay attention and care that their school district, which they're paying for — and by the way is educating the next generation of democracy participants — that system is in crisis. And needs somebody to do something about it. 

[00:15:43] Jane Tunks Demel: So Ben, what would the hope be with a recall and how it might shift the direction of these budget cuts that are on the table?

[00:15:51] Ben Gitenstein: Okay. I think you have to think about time scale. The most impactful thing we can do to shift what's happening on the school board right now is public advertising. If we want to change the behavior of the Superintendent and the board, we have to keep the pressure on as parent advocates and as voters. 

We have to go to school board meetings, we have to testify. We have to rally people. We have to encourage people. We have to make yard signs. We have to send letters. We have to organize PTAs. You have to fight in the beaches, fight in the towns, fight on the streets. You have to take it to them everywhere so they cannot deny that the families of Seattle don't want this.

 A recall is about two things. It serves two purposes for those of us who want to see change. 

The first is it sends a very clear message that there is a group of dedicated parents who are willing to spend an absurd amount of their own personal time trying to change the makeup of the school board, trying to hold the school board accountable for its behavior.

And that goes to the second piece. The second way a recall really helps is it ostensibly removes badly behaving legislators who are violating their oath of office and who are demonstrating misfeasance and malfeasance. 

Maybe another way to put it is this is operating on a different time scale. Because what we're saying is we should hold our legislators to a higher standard and we should not accept that elected officials will behave this way. It's a group of parents saying, “This is not okay. You don't get to do this.” And it's not just about an individual policy decision. It's about the entire way you're approaching being a legislator.

[00:17:55] Christie Robertson: Okay, Ben. So you mentioned misfeasance, malfeasance, or a violation of oath of office. So which, or all of those, are you considering to be the case?

[00:18:07] Ben Gitenstein: I think if you look at the behavior of the school board, in particular if you look at the legislative behavior of President Rankin, you'll see several classes of action that are just fundamentally not okay and I believe meet that bar. 

First is that, while I fundamentally disagree with the idea of closing schools, as an elected official, it's your prerogative to invoke, to make policy decisions I disagree with. That's not recallable. But it is your responsibility to use a process that is proper, fair, well noticed and transparent. 

And this board, in particular, Director Rankin, has done anything but [that]. 

The process by which they have approached school closures has been rushed. The goalposts have moved pretty much every time they've talked about it. The dates have moved pretty much every time they've talked about it. The rationale has changed frequently. And the process, in and of itself, even the way they enact the process has been improper. So you definitely see that. 

The second sort of class of problems is transparency, communication, public engagement. This goes back to being undemocratic. They, this board, has essentially walled itself off from the public. And they have removed avenues for the public to understand what they're doing, the rationale for their actions, and to influence them in all the ways that you would expect citizens to be able to influence their public officials.

The third sort of general area of behavior that I believe rises to misfeasance and malfeasance in violation of their oath is that they have, as elected officials, completely abdicated their oversight and accountability role. They have decided that is not their job. And the problem with that is that they are the only ones who can do it. If they don't do it, literally no one else can. 

And so if they're not doing it, then you just essentially have an unaccountable management team of a $1.2 billion organization serving 40,000 kids, running over 100 buildings. And if you don't have a finance committee, if you don't have an operations committee, we can't be shocked that you have the largest child reshuffle in basically 20 years, when no one is asking hard questions from the board about operations decisions. 

You can't be shocked that almost every board meeting, they are being asked to approve cost overrun on a building when the board has said, “We don't really do oversight.” Well, if you don't do it, like no one else can. I can't! So like, where is this supposed to happen? 

And you put those three things together. 

By the way, I would put student safety squarely in that third bucket. The shocking incidents of student safety and violence in our schools, you have to lay that at the feet of the oversight not being done by our board. Not because our board can somehow magically get guns off the street. I'm not a fool. I recognize the state of gun policy in America. But schools are institutions that are incredibly complicated, and they play a role in safety. And the decisions made at the school level and at the district level play a role in how safe the buildings are. And if the school board doesn't deep dive into the safety decisions being made at the school level or at the district level, we can't be super shocked if the schools become less safe. I don't know what the other alternatives are. 

Which is why, again, I think a recall is an extraordinary measure, but it's by all means justified because there's no alternative.

[00:23:21] Jane Tunks Demel: And I think the limited oversight from the board is apparent when you see these two options that were presented to them for school closures. Option A to close 21 schools and option B to close 17 schools. Because the way it was done with the boundaries, it was almost like plotting a new map of unsettled land into nice tidy square boundaries that didn't make any sense with how you're splitting up communities or making students cross major highways, et cetera.

[00:23:57] Ben Gitenstein: Basically, 60 to 70 percent of elementary school students under I think both of those plans would have to make new friends next year.

[00:24:06] Christie Robertson: And so is there like a specific law or policy about oversight or about democratic input that you can point to that they violated? 

[00:24:19] Ben Gitenstein: Yes, there are a large number of both school board policy and RCW and WAC dictates for how you are meant to engage with the community, how a school closure process is meant to be followed, for the process for closing any site in which educational services are brought, and for the definition of the role of a board member. And it's their oversight responsibility, that I think a reasonable person would clearly say they are not living up to. Will a judge? I don't know. 

There's a separate conversation that we should have about capital dollars in in our schools, because one of the things that I think is at the root of our problem is that we are awash in capital dollars and starved for operating dollars. And so long as that is the case, we have distorted incentives to build buildings but not hire teachers, and pay teachers well, and serve students, especially the students who need the most help. As long as we have that, we will have big, shiny, fancy new buildings with exhausted, overtaxed teachers. And it's upside down. Should we have fewer capital dollars? I don't know. I sort of don't particularly care, because we don't really have any trouble passing our capital levies. And honestly, considering the wealth in Seattle, it's like a drop in the bucket.

That's not the problem. The problem is that we're so short on operating dollars. And I get it. McCleary. The deal that [Frank] Chopp and others did. Sure, legislators got to make deals to get things done, I totally understand. But if we don't fix that, we're gonna keep finding ourselves in the same weird place. 

[00:26:27] Jane Tunks Demel: Was that deal led by Frank Chopp? 

[00:26:29] Ben Gitenstein: Well, I'm not putting it at his feet.

I'm a deep admirer of Frank Chopp. He was basically my first boss when I was down in Olympia. But basically Frank and others had to get the McCleary deal done. And the Republicans basically squeezed them. 

I'm oversimplifying, I know, but that's where the levy lid came from, basically, was Republicans were, “Fine, you want us to spend a whole bunch more money, ha, we're going to get you by not letting you pass your own operating levies.” And you know, we did the right thing. We got a whole bunch of money into the public education system. That's awesome. But now we gotta fix that part.

[00:27:06] Jane Tunks Demel: Okay. So Ben, let's say if there were a recall of the Seattle School Board, either just one member or all the members. And let's say that the voters voted on that. What happens next? Like who will be the new school board directors and how are they appointed?

[00:27:24] Ben Gitenstein: It's just like what happened when our two recent board members left. The remaining board appoints. And it's an interesting question of what happens if they're all gone. Because then it's the Puget Sound Educational District. Which I don't think I have that name exactly right. They essentially take over and start running the board until you have an election and get a new set of board members in.

So, if magically, all of the board members suddenly resigned or were recalled, that's what would happen in the interim. I have no idea who those people are, and if they're better, worse, more insane, less insane. I have no idea.

I think the thing to note is that if we are able to hold our current school board members accountable and get the ones that have behaved the worst off of the dais, we have an opportunity to, one, appoint new ones, but also send a message to voters in Seattle, families of the school district, and the remaining school board members that, hey, people are watching. We are paying attention to how you behave. 

And we recognize that it's an unpaid position, and it's really hard, and the choices put in front of you are never easy all of that. But still you signed up for this job, and you are a part of the democratic system, and you need to behave like it. You need to be approachable, you need to be accessible to the public, you need to listen to your voters and constituents, and you need to behave like that. And if you don't go do something else. Go find some other way to help. But don't do this.

[00:29:15] Jane Tunks Demel: So we want to talk a little bit more, Ben, about how a recall could shift the direction of these closures, because we're thinking about, you know, there's option A, there's option B, and then there's all these potential option Cs. So do you have any words of wisdom here? 

[00:29:35] Ben Gitenstein: Here's my thought on that. I fundamentally believe that there is a small minority of school board legislators and former school board members, who believe strongly that we should close a bunch of elementary schools. And they have believed it for years. Some of them have said it on the record in school board meetings, and they believed it long before there was a $100 million budget deficit.

I don't know that recalling a school board member can stop a policy proposal, but I do believe that we can, I would hope that we could change the makeup of the board such that we no longer had board directors who believed that school closures were the option of first resort, that they were the object of a strategy, as opposed to the action of last resort, when you find that a particular school really can't be fixed because the building is infused with mold and the culture of the school is unfixable and it's unsafe or whatever your reasoning for closing an individual school. 

That's not what we're dealing with. We're dealing with a small number of legislators who actively want to close schools. They ran on it. They said it in public meetings. It is an object of their strategy, not a tactic. And I would hope that a school board recall could remove those folks and also send a message to others that the people of Seattle don't support that.

I also want a pony, so ….

[Ben, Jane, and Christie laugh.]

[00:31:53] Jane Tunks Demel: And do you think there might be any unintended consequences that could happen as a result of a recall, a successful recall?

[00:32:02] Ben Gitenstein: Yeah, I think there absolutely could be unintended consequences. I think there could be. I think that's why I don't take it lightly at all, and I'd hope people would know that I don't believe that we should consider doing this because we don't like somebody or we don't like the policy decisions they're enacting. I think we should do this because we're in crisis and our legislators refuse to engage with us. And, yeah, absolutely, there could be unintended consequences.

Recalls should not happen. This should not, this is not a thing that should be happening. We should just wait for an election. 100%. But we don't have that, we don't have that luxury anymore.

[00:32:42] Christie Robertson: Ben. Thanks so much for joining us and for sharing your thoughts on your option C for the school district.If you know somebody with an option C that you think we should interview, let us know by emailing us at hello@seattlehallpass.org.

[00:32:59] Jane Tunks Demel: In the meantime, we have a whole queue of different option Cs coming up in our next few episodes. 

[00:33:04] Christie Robertson: Our show notes are available at seattlehallpass.org. We will have links to the citations, laws, et cetera, that Ben mentioned related to recall. 

[00:33:13] Jasmine Pulido: While you're at our website, you can also click the Donate button to help us fund our costs. We're not quite there yet. So contributing as little as the price of a cup of coffee once a month is so helpful to us. 

[00:33:26] Christie Robertson: I'm Christie Robertson.

[00:33:28] Jane Tunks Demel: I'm Jane Tunks Demel. 

[00:33:30] Jasmine Pulido: And I'm Jasmine Pulido. We'll see you next time on Seattle Hall Pass.